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Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Save the Date for CALL Conference 2014!
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Live stream of the Canonization of John XXIII and John Paul II - April 27, 2014
Saturday, April 19, 2014
From death to life
The
fact that Christianity has stood firm over the last twenty centuries of human
history is due to the confession of faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Risen One,
the Living One, present in the life of Christians.
This
is therefore the principal confession of the faith of Christians: “If Christ did not rise from the dead, our
faith and our preaching is in vain” (1 Co 15,14). But this confession of
faith is sustained by evidence, a historical fact: the life of men and women,
followers of Jesus of Nazareth who —following the death of the Nazarene on the
cross—
experienced a transforming reality in their life; they became new men and women
(cf Eph 2,18), confessing that the One who died changed their life and, if in
fact he changed their life, it was because he rose again and is living!
Such
a transformation consists fundamentally in a change of mentality (cf Eph 4,23),
of criteria, of logic: a new way of seeing and facing up to reality according
to the logic and wisdom of God, and of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is not
the logic of the world (cf James 3,13 and 1 Co 1). They now discover that they
are —just as Jesus himself had lived and had taught them— children of God (Gal
4,6) and related to each other as brothers and sisters (1 Jn 3,14). They
discover that the old order of things is obsolete: “The old has passed away, the new has come” (2 Co 5,17) and they
begin to read and interpret their own life and all reality “in the light” of what happened in the
life of Jesus of Nazareth: his passion, his death, his resurrection.
That
is to say that the basis of their confession of faith in Jesus as risen again
—concretely— is the new life of men and women who bear testimony to the
transforming work in them of the One who was crucified (cf Acts 2).
Two
thousand years have now passed since that event, the passion, death and
resurrection of Jesus Christ, and every Sunday and every year, in the Christian
Easter celebration, Christ’s disciples of all ages and from all corners of the
earth, from the most diverse origins and in the molds of the most diverse
cultures, continue to confess Christ as the Risen One and present in human
history.
This
confession of faith is empty if it does not spring from the experience of men
and women who —today, as well as yesterday— continue to experience a
transformation of their life which urges them to live out the commandment of
love, in the recognition that we are brothers and sisters, children of the same
Father: “In this we know that we have
passed from death to life, in that we love each other” (1 Jn 3,14).
Yet
today there are many realities that deny the confession of faith in the
resurrection of Christ. For to confess Christ as the Living One is, above all,
to confess the triumph of the Father’s designs in the Son (Phil 2,10), contrary
to those who preferred to see him dead. It is to confess the truth of abundant
life in God (Jn 10,10) over against a thousand forms of death (1 Co 15,55),
which —without God, without love— we invent. To confess Christ as the Risen One
is to confess that the light overcame the darkness (1 Thess 5,5) and that —from
now on— it is possible to build human life and society more in line with God’s
will and less according to the caprice of despots.
For
that reason, the Christian celebration of Easter is the remembrance of what
happened in the life of Jesus and of the first Christians and it is, above all,
a commitment. The commitment that every disciple of Christ must show with his
life, with his deeds and words, with his behavior and attitudes the abundant
life that God offers us in Jesus Christ: “I
have come that they might have life, and have it in abundance” (Jn 10,10).
While
millions of our brothers in the world live in situations of extreme poverty,
indigence and misery; while the conditions of a precarious life and misery that
shroud the great majority of humanity lead them to death rather than life; while
even a single person goes hungry on earth (cf Acts 2,42 and 4,32), the
celebration of Easter calls each believer in Christ to greater authenticity, greater
commitment, greater efficacy, greater truthfulness and a greater sense of all
that we believe, profess and hope for.
In
Christ, God’s final word concerning the destiny of man is not death on the
cross or the thousand crosses that exist, but rather life. The resurrection of
Christ and our resurrection in him fills our existence with meaning, but also
motivates us to build better lives, a better society and a better world in
which we can see, live and build, not according to the world’s logic, but
according to God’s logic.
Let
us then celebrate our Christian Easter: the passing from death to life, from
slavery to the law of the fullness of love, but through Christ, with Him and in
Him, let us also leave behind convenience, half-heartedness and the routine of
our lives and move to the active combat of men and women who —because of the
gospel of Christ—struggle to make possible a world in which Christ is truly
alive in the life of all and in every social circle: in politics and in the
culture, in the academy and in sports, in the arts and in religion, in science
and in our labor…
So
that today, as in yesteryear, the confession of faith of the Crucified yet
Living One might be accompanied and validated by the life of new men and women who
build, day by day, a more human world, that is, more fraternal, more equitable,
with more solidarity, more justice. Have a HAPPY
EASTER!
Friday, April 18, 2014
Pope Francis welcomes representatives of Museum of the Bible and American Bible Society
On March 31st, His Holiness Pope Francis granted an audience to the representatives of Museum of the Bible and executives of American Bible Society. On this occasion, Pope Francis welcomed our delegation at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
Our visit was due to the inauguration of Verbum Domini II Bible Exhibit on display at the Vatican until June 22nd.
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Saturday, April 12, 2014
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